Q&A with Darrel McLeod for Hamilton Review of Books

Darrel J. McLeod is Cree from treaty eight territory in Northern Alberta. After a varied career, including the position of chief negotiator of land claims for the federal government and executive director of education and international affairs with the Assembly of First Nations, he now devotes himself to writing and music in Sooke, B.C. Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age (Douglas & McIntyre, 2018), a memoir, is his first book. It won the 2018 Governor General’s Award in Nonfiction.

Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail: This book has been described as a series of linked vignettes, and you’ve said they started out as short stories in your course with Betsy Warland at Simon Fraser University. How did you access all those memories?

Darrel McLeod: One of the things I do when I’m writing is I put on music: I put on a song or two from that era, and floods of memories come. The time I spent at my great grandfather’s cabin in the bush. My cousins. My early childhood. That wasn’t difficult at all.

The childhood songs were just there in my memory from listening to them over and over again, and singing them too. Other ones that I didn’t know as well, I’d research. Then one song would lead to all these others. I’d listen to those songs over and over again. It turned on a lot of emotions – so evocative.